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Reflections on Palantir

(nabeelqu.substack.com)
479 points freditup | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.626s | source
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austinjp ◴[] No.41867353[source]
The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt.

We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider world. There's more to life than intellectual satisfaction.

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dan-robertson ◴[] No.41867539[source]
Doesn’t the article say the OP wanted to work on meaningful problems in healthcare and bio? I don’t think what you describe sounds like that.
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kome ◴[] No.41867717[source]
he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".
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1. killjoywashere ◴[] No.41869776[source]
> weak ethical discussion

followed by a one clause stone-throw. Irony?

So, the major democracies are imperialist powers? Do you live in a small dictatorship? If not, to be consistent with the rock you just threw, you don't pay your taxes? Do you just not take responsibility for anything? Because that's what he's arguing Palantir does.

Here's another take: since WW2 there's been a messy but semi-stable competition between the great powers expressed most visibly through a series of proxy wars near the perimeter of Russia and China. However, the competition is also expressed in the global economy, on the networks, in space, in the oceans. Turns out good people are often forced into ethically tenuous situations and in a world with 8 billion people, every one of whom has lots of opinions, there's a lot of possibility for entirely reasonable people to find themselves in life-and-death struggles.

Wolf packs defend their resources, mainly by marking their territorial boundaries but occasionally they fight. Are they unethical in doing so? Are we any different?

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2. kome ◴[] No.41870303[source]
ah yes, invoking the age-old "wolf pack" analogy to explain the complexities of global politics—because who hasn't looked at international relations and thought, "If only we acted more like wolves marking territory"? If those are the premises (and THOSE are your premises), then no discussion about ethics is necessary indeed.